"Pain simplifies your point of view. When something gives you pleasure, then, too, it's hard to think of other things." In other words, pain's survival value is in how it distracts us from other goals.
While from one perspective pleasure and pain can be viewed as opposites, we also can think of them as being similar. "Why do we find such similarities between antagonistic things? [...] In order to appear opposed, two things must serve related goals -- or otherwise engage the selfsame agencies."
(NB: Again, this makes me think of the winner-take-all view of agency competition. Are we to infer from this chapter that if two capacities are clearly in opposition to one another, then they should be viewed as agents at the same level of a society which are competing for control?)
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